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Thursday, 29 June 2017

Fifty years ago, I was at Cambridge University. Traffic in the city center was so bad that the university banned students from running motor vehicles, and every hour, on the hour, a flock of bicycles appeared as undergraduates, gowns flying out behind them, travelled from lecture to lecture. And I was one of them.

Gowns, yes, Under certain circumstances, you were required to wear your academic gown; most people just wore them all the time, it was easier than trying to follow the rules.

But I owned a moped. A Mobylette, 50cc, top speed 30 mph, one gear, pedals for extra acceleration. A moped that I wasn't allowed to use.

But I found a loophole. The president of a college sporting club was allowed to run a motor vehicle. So I created the Fitzwilliam Bridge Club, which was rather small in membership (i.e., only me) and I was the president. And I went to the Powers That Be with this information, and asked for a motor vehicle licence. And to my amazement, they accepted my claim that bridge is a sport, and granted the licence. So I spent the rest of my time there buzzing about on a moped, which, since Fitzwilliam is at the top of the long, steep and tedious Castle Hill, was a major benefit.

Wednesday, 28 June 2017

Yesterday, a Ten Commandments monument was emplaced at the Arkansas Capitol. This was contentious - here's why.

The first amendment to the US constitution says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". This is the basis for the "separation of church and state" that many Americans believe in passionately. On the other hand, followers of some religions think that their religion should be embedded in the legal system.

So you can see why placing a symbol of one particular religion (in this case, the Jewish religion, because they were given to Moses to guide the Jews) might arouse controversy. Oddly, the monument to the Ten Commandments was not put in place by a consortium of Jews; instead (I'll explain why in a moment) it was put in place by public subscription, and heavily funded and endorsed by Christians.

This is odd, because Christians don't generally abide by the laws in the Old Testament. They eat pork and shellfish, tattoos, shave their beards, wear clothes of mixed fibers and don't honour the Sabbath day, ignoring that in favour of the following day which they call "The Lord's day".

Christians seem to think that a monument to the Ten Commandments, is a Christian symbol, and I don't think many people have pointed out that it isn't. Oh well. No-one said that religions have to be self-consistent.

As an aside - why the Ten Commandments? Well, you may remember the movie starring Charlton Heston. Just before then, the Fraternal Order of Eagles bought 4000 stones depicting the Ten Commandments, and scattered them around the USA. The movie promoters saw this as a great way to promote the movie, and the rest is history.

So anyway. From time to time, some pious bunch of Christians think that it would be a great idea to put this Jewish symbol on some piece of public property. And this causes a ruckus. Because a private individual can put whatever religious symbol they like on their own land, but the state cannot favour any one religion, because of the First Amendment. Usually, the Freedom from Religion Foundation points out the error, and (sometimes after a lawsuit that the religious cannot win (see First Amendment)) it is taken down. Or else, some group wins the right to put up their symbol next to it, which can be even more hilarious, as when the Satanic Temple gets the right to put up their statue to Baphomet, or gets the right to distribute the "Satanic Children's BIG BOOK of Activities" (which, despite the alarming title, is entirely innocuous) in places where the bible is being distributed.

So.

The Ten Commandments monument was emplaced on Tuesday. On Wednesday, it was down, but not taken down by legal action (legal action had been commenced). It was taken down by direct action.

When I heard about this, my first thought was, who would do such a thing? I can't believe that an atheist would break the law in this way; we have a good moral compass. And moslems in America mostly keep their heads down and believe in "live and let live". So who would take down the Ten Commandments?

It turns out, a Christian. And he's done it before. This time, he rammed it with his car, and it was shattered into pieces. Here's what it looked like before.

Now let's just look a bit more closely.

Notice the second commandment, "Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven images."

And then look at the engraving above it ... yes, you noticed? A graven image. It's an eagle. This stone breaks the second commandment.

I don't suppose anyone cares - after all the people who put it up, don't think that Old Testament laws apply to them. Except when they find one that they like, of course.

Michael Tate Reed faces charges of defacing an object or public respect. He took video as he did it. On Facebook, he said that he did it because of freedom.

"This is Michael Reed, and I'm a firm believer that salvation is that we not only have faith in Jesus Christ but that we obey the commands of God..."

"But one thing I do not support is the violation of our Constitutional right to have the freedom that's guarantees us separation of church and state because no one religion should the government represent. So ... back at it again... so if you're in support of this, you can talk about it using the hashtag checkmate, and also I'm using my own car that I paid for."

So it looks like this was done by a Christian, in support of the First Amendment.

Tuesday, 27 June 2017

This one is called "Petya". And it's a bit cunning; instead of encrypting the files, it encrypts the Master File Table (MFT), which is the equivalent of the File Allocation Table in Dos.

That's slightly good news, because it means that it can't affect files that you access on a server, because the client can't access the MFT.

It looks like it gets in via an attachment to an email, which a user clicks on (you *cannot* rely on all users refraining from clicking on tempting attachments, and it only needs one to click) and then spreading within the LAN using the same SMB loophole that Wannacry used. And, of course, your firewall doesn't keep out incoming emails, and your firewall doesn't block accesses within your LAN, only accesses from outside.

So you're relying on A) your users being canny enough not to click on even the most tempting attachments, and good luck with that, or B) your antivirus.

Copies of the virus have been submitted to online testing systems
that check if security software, particularly anti-virus systems, were
able to spot and stop it.

"Only two vendors were able to detect
it so many systems are defenceless if they are unpatched and relying on
anti-virus," he said."Online testing systems" probably means virustotal.com, and that means that only two out of 55 antivirus products would flag it.

That should be no surprise to readers of this blog; I've been saying for a long time now that antivirus products, although great for viruses (which stopped being a threat a decade or two ago), do pretty much nothing against today's threat, which is malware arriving via email. And the reason is obvious.

If you're about to spam out your ransomware, you first make sure that the 50 leading antivirus products don't flag it, and you keep tinkering with it until that's the case, by testing each of your attempts against those top 50 products (you can do this using Virustotal.com). Then you spam it out to a zillion email addresses, because if only one in a thousand users click on it, you're in the money. And at that point, the antivirus companies start to see this new thing, and write detection for it, and test their new update, and broadcast it out to their users, by which time it's too late.

So what can you do?

Well, backups are always a good idea. But restoring yesterday's backup is not going to be a popular action. If I've spent the day typing in billings for 100 people, I A) don't want to do that again, and B) I don't want them to be double-billed.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again. It's easy to run your own mail server. And it's easy to tell whether an email originated from within your local network, or from outside. And if it came from outside, it's easy to detach any attachment. If it's a ZIP or RAR file, unpack it to see what it contains. If it's an EXE file, a JS file or a SCR file or something like that, then you don't pass it on to the user. If it's a DOC file or an XLS file, you sanitise it by removing the macros before passing it on (and keep a copy, in case the user really did need those macros, in which case it came from someone they actually know, and you can check that it really was sent by a colleague). If it's a PDF file, you sanitise it by converting it to HTML then back to PDF (which would leave behind any nasty inserted in it. And so on.

In other words, don't expect the users to do the job that should be done, almost automatically, by the mail server.

And just in case you think that this is difficult to do, I spent a few minutes writing a demonstration. This is running on a Raspberry Pi; on a real server, it would be a lot faster.
It shows how a DOC file can be converted to PDF, RTF and a text file. It also checks it against virustotal.com, which is what takes most of the time.

And I'll just repeat, in case repeating helps.

"Only two vendors were able to detect
it so many systems are defenceless if they are unpatched and relying on
anti-virus," he said.

Monday, 26 June 2017

Theresa May is offering the DUP £1 billion to be spent in Northern Ireland in exchange for ten votes. I am *so* glad that I resisted the temptation to vote Tory. It makes the Tories look dirty.

Let's look at the consequences of this.

1) It doesn't really get her any more votes than she would have got anyway; the DUP are very Tory and would have voted with the Tories anyway, rather than risk another election.

2) It means that our government is cosied up to one side of the Northern Ireland divide. But the peace in NI depends on the Good Friday agreement, and we said we wouldn't take sides on NI. Have we forgotten the Troubles?

3) According to the Barnett formula, Wales should now get £1.7 billion, Scotland £2.9 billion.

4) Where did this money come from? Did she find the Magic Money Tree?

5) There's 12 votes in the Scottish Conservative party. What do you suppose they're going to say? They'll want their £2.9 billion. Maybe May has gained 10 votes and lost 12.

6) The DUP, founded by the Reverend Ian Paisley (remember him?) are anti-abortion, anti-gay, climate change deniers and creationists.

Tory MPs are defending the deal by saying Northern Ireland faces “special circumstances”. Indeed, the “special circumstances” being the need to bribe the DUP.

I'm guessing that this move is legal, because I don't see a team from the Serious Fraud Office raiding Number 10 right now, but it's immoral, unethical, and ...

Friday, 23 June 2017

I had thought that it was mostly the Church of England that was schisming over gayness. It turns out that Jews are too.

It all comes from Leviticus 18 and 20. "If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them."

Obviously, as this is from a Holy Book, it has to be interpreted. My interpretation is, "If two men have sex, they must be killed". Other people interpret this differently, as anything from "Not a problem" to "Gay sex forbidden, but no death penalty". I notice that hardly anyone (Daesh excepted) still holds to the death penalty part.

And the problem is, if you think that your Holy Book is the infallible word of God, then the words in it are important, and it's important to use the correct interpretation. Except that the Holy Book doesn't tell you the correct interpretation. So you have to argue about it. And there is, actually, no basis for argument except what you feel is right and proper, and if you're able to know what you think is right and proper, what's the Holy Book doing for you? Don't look at me for answers, I'm an atheist.

There isn't only one Jewish community, of course, just as there isn't just one kind of Christian. There's Ashkenazis (like me, origin in Russia/Poland) and there's Sephardis (like my sister's husband, origins Iraq/India/Spain). The main difference, as far as I can tell, is the cuisine. And I prefer Ashkenazi cuisine (as cooked by my wife's brother's wife), but my sister is also skilled in the Sephardi cuisine, and the Seder meal at her place is always a treat. Ladysolly, of course, can cook anything.

Perhaps a bigger divide is on frumness, how pious you are. There's the Liberal and Reform jews, who (I think) don't eat bacon but are otherwise indistinguishable from the Goyim. There's the Conservative synagogue, which my mother would have attended if she had ever attended synagogue, and where I was Barmitzvahed at an age before I felt confident enough to "just say no", and there's the Charedis.

The Charedis are the ones who "dress like jews". Go to Stamford Hill and you'll see them all over. Or Golders Green. Long black coats, white shirts, funny hats ... why do so many religious mark themselves out with funny hats? It isn't compulsory to dress like that, but it is traditional, and tradition is really important to those guys.

So.

Rabbi Dweck, the senior rabbi of the UK Sephardi Charedis, gave a lecture on male homosexuality last April, and the resulting controversy has been raging ever since.

I'm not even going to try to summarise his position - if you're interested, Google is your friend. But it's very clear that there's at least two sides being taken, and the similarity to the C of E schism is striking.

So let me put in my own view here. The problem is, there is now a *lot* of people who understand perfectly well that gay sex is nobody's business except for the people doing it. And a lot of people who think, well, as long as no third party is getting hurt, why should we care what consenting adults do together?

Well, that's not the problem. The problem, is, of course, the Holy Book, which spells out unambiguously that this is an *abomination*, and in case that isn't crystal clear, it explains "they shall surely be put to death". Leviticus is, of course, the Old Testament, one of the five books of Moses and so revered by the Jews. And the Christians have a very ambivalent attitude towards the Old Testament; sometimes saying that it's part of God's infallible word, and sometimes saying that it's been replaced by the New Testament (they use the word "fulfilled" but they actually mean "replaced"). But, as in all things holy, you pick and choose the bits you like, and although some Christians go with the abomination bit, others prefer to ignore it. Just like they ignore the stuff about shellfish. Go figure.

So how do you reconcile what you brain is telling you, with what your Holy Book is telling you? You can't. So you're stuck with believing two mutually contradictory things, and that's called Cognitive Dissonance although personally I prefer the term "Doublethink". And doublethink must be painful.

Thank god, I'm an atheist, so I don't have to struggle with this. My only problem is to find a sufficiently large bag of popcorn as I watch the fatuous frenzied fight.

Wednesday, 21 June 2017

After I voted in the recent election, I stopped outside the polling station to deliver a diatribe to a man wearing a blue rosette, on the subject of "Your revisiting of the fox hunting laws is one of the main reasons I didn't vote Tory this time. It was a stupid hostage to fortune and will probably cost you the election."

He would have passed the comment along to the Conservative Party HQ, and as a result, the possible re-legalisation of this barbaric practice whereby the unspeakable pursue the uneatable and kill it, will not happen.

Except that, as I've pointed out quite a few times, austerity never happened. What I do find hard to understand is how people got fooled into thinking that it did.

I can understand why the Tories pretended it was happening, they being the Party of Fiscal Responsibility, and I can understand why Labour pretended it was happening, the Tories being the Party of All Nastiness.

Tuesday, 20 June 2017

In 1976, we had a long, hot summer, and a drought, and a hosepipe ban. My allotment was like a desert even with heavy use of my watering can. At work, we used to go into the computer room just to cool down.

I planted several times as many lettuces as I thought we wanted, on the expectation that they'd nearly all die, but then the government appointed Denis Howell as Minister for Drought, and that worked, because we got lots of rain. My lettuces flourished, and I had so many that I brought a couple of dozen into work, and we went down to the Royal Park and had a lettuce tasting party, wiith wine.

If it gets too bad tomorrow, I'm going to hole up in my data center and turn the air conditioning up to "Arctic".

My vocabulary is pretty good, I think (although I recently learned "metonymy" and I'm keen to find a place to use it). But I was stumped today.

I went to visit the doctor, we're still working on clearing up the last vestiges of my Dreaded Lurgi. I have a bit of a wheeze, sometimes and a bit of a cough, and slight phlegm. The doctor calls it "asthma".

So the doctor asked me to describe how it felt, and I explained about the intermittent wheeze, and that I'm coughing a bit more than I'd expect to, and then I tried to describe the other symptom, and I had a problem.

The word is "chaiseriche". That's a word I learned from my mother, and I'm guessing that it's yiddish but I don't actually know that. It's the word I've always used to describe this feeling, and ladysolly doesn't know what it means (and nor did the doctor, of course). But I can't think of an English word to describe the tickly-hoarse-coughy sensation that is encapsulated in "chaiseriche".

Monday, 19 June 2017

At last, I've learned of a disaster in which the "thoughts and prayers" response is appropriate.

From: William Snyder <wlscello@aol.com>Reply-To: wlscello@yandex.com

HelloI really hope you get this fast. I could not inform anyone about our trip, because it wasimpromptu. We had to be in Philippines for a Tour..the program was successful, but our journeyhas turned sour. We misplaced our wallets and cell phones on our way back to the hotel after wewent for sight seeing. The wallet contains all the valuables we have. Now, our luggage is incustody of the hotel management pending when we make payment.I am sorry if i am inconveniencing you, but I have only very few people to turn to now. I willbe very grateful if I can get a short term loan of ($1,950) from you. This will enable me sortour hotel bills and get my sorry self back home. I will really appreciate whatever you canafford at this moment. I promise to refund it in full as soon as I return. Please let me know ifyou can be of any assistance.ThanksWill Snyder

Wednesday, 14 June 2017

In the letters column of the Times today (the Times is the only newspaper that I can still bear to read) Professor David Frost (former principal, Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, Cambridge) says that evolution is bunk.

Well.

I don't know much about Professor David Frost, except from his former post, he's obviously a religionist, clearly a Christian and I suspect that "Orthodox" is what the rest of us would call "Greek Orthodox" or "Russian Orthodox". If so, this goes back to the schism of 1054, which was caused by issues such as whether leavened or unleavened bread should be used in the Eucharist. Personally, I prefer matzo, which is unleavened, but that's just a matter of taste. Anyhow, I don't think he's a biologist.

In his letter he cites Fred Hoyle as his authority. Fred was a great astronomer, and was very well known in that field. It was Fred who came up with the name "Big Bang" for the cosmological theory that we all use now, as a derogatory term. His own idea was "continuous creation", the Steady State theory. That seemed plausible until 1964, when the cosmic microwave radiation was discovered and measured. A more enduring contribution was for the theory of nucleosynthesis in stars, showing how elements heavier than helium, all the way up to iron, could be made in stars. A brilliant man, but, again, not a biologist.

Frost doesn't give his preferred theory of the origin of species, but I would guess that he's a creationist. God did it.

I'm not going to give all the evidence for evolution, there's plenty of good books. What I'd like to focus on, is how a (probably) very intelligent man, clever enough to become a professor, can be so wrong.

It's a blind spot. I've noticed that a lot of people have a blind spot, an area of thought that is totally dark to them, which they cannot see even when it is pointed out to them. If you roam around Facebook for a few days, you'll find many other instances of a blind spot by many other people. Not only can they not see into that blind spot, they cannot even perceive that they have a blind spot.

Tuesday, 13 June 2017

A nice lady with an Indian accent called me from 0039 028 718 9629 and said "Could you answer three questions? It will only take a minute." So I said "Yes, three questions."

The first question was "Is your name ..." So I confirmed that this was, indeed, myname, and said "That's one question." "No," she said, "that doesn't count as a question."

Then she said "Your phone number, is it ...." And I confirmed that this was, indeed, my phone number, and then said "That's two questions." "No," she said, "We don't start counting until I ask you your age, don't you understand that?" "No," I said, "And that's your three questions, goodbye" and I hung up.

Then she called back. "You're stupid," she began, so I hung up again.

Then she called back again, and got as far as "You're ..." and I hung up again. Why is she wasting her time, I'm obviously not a good prospect for whatever she's selling? So then I dialled 1471 to get her number, and then I made a complaint to the ICO.

Monday, 12 June 2017

If you lived in the EU, would you want to go work in the UK now? Not knowing what your future status might be?

Our future in the UK has been buggered up by, mostly, two people. Cameron, in order to fend off a split in the Conservative party, agreed to an unnecessary referendum, without specifying a minimum vote and without spelling out just what Brexit meant. He was followed by May, who called an unnecessary election and fought a lacklustre campaign to wind up without a clear majority. May also doesn't say what she's aiming for in Brexit, other than "Brexit means Brexit". And just to put jam on it, she's inviting the DUP (anti-abortion, anti-gay and anti-evolution) into the dinner party, thereby putting at risk the Northern Ireland peace process, because Westminster should not be taking sides in the negotiations between the two sides in Northern Ireland.

Other villains - Ed Milliband for A) displacing his brother David and B) introducing the change in Labour party rules that has solidified the Labour lurch to the far left.

Nigel Farage, the ex-stockbroker who poses outside pubs with a fag and a pint pretending to be a man-of-the-people, and who led the pressure for Brexit.

Boris Johnson, who led the lying in the pro-Brexit campaign.

Sigh.

Ladysolly today suggested that it might be time to start to think about lifeboats.

We're both not much under seventy, so we won't be looking for jobs. We both speak a little French, a bit less German and (in my case) tiny Latin. So we really want to live in an English-speaking country. So let's look at the possibilities.

The USA, obviously, is ruled out, and not just because of Trump. It's also the gun laws (which cause the massive gun casualties even though Americans can't understand what could possibly be leading to all these people getting shot), the lack of universal healthcare and the general plonkwittery of the Republican party who seem to be a bit like the DUP only with less Orange (namely, Trump). The other lot aren't much better).

Canada looks nice, but it's a long way away, and winter lasts 11 months.

South Africa? Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Australia and New Zealand look good, but they are *very* far away from here.

I suggested Scotland, but independence looks unlikely after the latest election, even if another (unlikely) referendum were called. In which case, Scotland shares the fate of the rest of the UK post-Brexit.

Brexit. The most unnecessary stupidity we've done since Suez, and it's still going to happen. Maybe hard, maybe soft, whatever either of those mean, and if you think that the other 27 EU members are going to let us have our cake and eat it, then you're a raving optimist. The terms and conditions for Brexit will be dictated by Brussels. May (who has demonstrated her weakness and wobbliness) will swallow whatever they spurt out and tell voters that she's successfully negotiated a brilliant deal.

Ladysolly suggested Ireland.

They speak English, the climate is the same as here (perhaps a bit more rain), they're in the EU, they have an NHS (the Health Service Executive). It's a democracy with proportional representation (hurrah). I don't like the religious leaning, but they recently approved gay marriage, so things are looking better now.

What are the factors that British people consider when casting their vote? I'll try to list the main ones, although I suspect that the largest factor is "The party I always vote for".

The biggest issues are probably the economy, and the NHS.

High up on the list, is the NHS, our National Health Service. This was set up in 1948, funded out of taxation, and pretty much free at the point of service. There are a few things that you make a small payment for, such a prescriptions at £8.60 per item. I get mine free, as I'm over 60.

But the staff are underpaid (the nurses pay rises were capped at 1% for the last several years), the service is (I'm told) underfunded and the NHS (I'm told) is on the verge of breakdown.

My personal experience of the NHS doesn't bear this out; my recent episode of The Dreaded Lurgi (see this blog, from early May 2017) was promptly treated by my local GP and when I was suspected of a DVT (deep vein thrombosis) was promptly and carefully treated in my local hospital (I didn't have DVT, it was probably just a muscle strain). But a sample of one isn't significant. And funding for the NHS is a major political issue.

One problem here, is that there is no upper limit to the demand for healthcare, and without any price deterrent, the only way to limit demand is via rationing, which is the reason for "waiting lists". Also, the UK population is aging, as a result of ... better healthcare. We love our NHS, and feel sad that our American friends have nothing like that.

On the Economy. The cuts (according to Labour). Or the austerity (according to the
Tories). Both are fake. What has actually happened, is that the growth
in government spending has not been as great as some people would like.
Austerity means "difficult economic conditions created by government
measures to reduce public expenditure." and cuts mean "reductions".

Immigration is an issue, and may be one of the reasons we voted for Brexit. But Germans, French and Poles coming to this country have a lot in common with the British culture, whereas immigrants from non-EU countries such as Pakistan are a lot more different.

Another important issue, is policing. In the last several years, police numbers have dropped by 20,000, a fall of 14%. In the last few months, we've seen three terrorist incidents, and this has made people wonder if reducing police numbers was a good idea.

Another issue is education. There's the pay of teachers, there's classroom sizes and the question of university fees and student loans.

Social services is somewhat linked to the NHS issue, because if someone can't be moved to a care home, they might continue to occupy a hospital bed.

Tax - how much should we pay, and where should the burden lie? Are some big international companies getting away with paying less tax than we would like? Could the rich pay more to support those less well off? And we should close tax loopholes (except that every government tries to do that, and manages to leave a great many, and open new ones. Tax is *complicated*. And we shouldn't blame the companies that operate withn the rules, if the rules aren't what they should be, only the politicians are to blame.

On the environment - until recently, the government was pushing diesel as being less polluting than petrol; now they've reversed course. A year ago, I switched from petrol to diesel. Thanks, UKGOV. And does the move from coal to wood chips really represent an improvement? There's just as much carbon dioxide emitted. Wind power is very strong here, but you can't actually rely on the wind to blow, and we don't have much electricity storage.

Brexit. The referendum said "Do Brexit", but apart from that, it didn't say anything. Should we leave the EU but remain part of the single market with free movement of people? Or not? We talk about "hard" and "soft" Brexit, without actually knowing exactly what these mean, and Theresa May's "Brexit means Brexit" doesn't really help at all.
We have no idea what's happening, and no-one is going to tell us until it's all decided. And even then there will be lots of porkies about what's agreed.

Defence. Our army, navy and air force are shrinking; perhaps we're not expecting to go to war any time soon, so maybe that's not such a bad idea. We still have our nuclear deterrent, although Corbyn has said that he wouldn't be the first to use it (quite right too). But when asked whether he'd use it as a retaliation, he's ducked and dodged the questions. Which, in my opinion, is OK, because as long as you leave the possibility open, it's still a deterrent. It's a tactic I've used myself; not actually saying that I'd do something, but also not ruling it out.

And here are some non-issues, that maybe you thought were issues.

Terrorism. Is actually very minor in the UK, expecially when compared to how bad it was during the 1970s, which is within living memory.

Roads. Yes, there could be fewer potholes, but they're in pretty good condition.

Burkas. Some people want them banned, the great majority think that people should wear whatever they want, except in particular circumstances (for example, you can't go into a petrol station wearing a full face helmet).

Unemployment. Doesn't seem to be an issue.

Clean air, water. Hardly any complaints here.

Foreign policy. We get a bit annoyed when a foreign leader tweets insults to the Mayor of London right after a terrorist attack, but that's mostly your problem, not ours. We live on an island, and know it. The main foreign policy is to do with Brexit, and no-one knows what our policy is. Probably including our politicians.

No go areas. I've heard that some people think that there are lawless areas in the UK. Some people will always think what they want to think, in defiance of reality. There aren't any no go areas.

Guns. We don't have them, and don't want them, because we can see what happens when guns are freely available, the USA provides an excellent Dreadful Example. Even our police are not routinely armed. We do have some armed police, we call them "firearms officers" and they have particular training.

Religion. Any politician who tries to play the god card causes prolonged and high-volume hilarity. We don't do god here. Less than 2% of the population are churchgoers (and falling). We celebrate Christmas with trees, shopping and overeating, and we celebrate Easter with chocolate and bunnies. I find it hard to understand the situation (and hypocrisy) about religion in the US.

Climate change. We've heard of it, and we're doing our bit, but in the UK what we have mostly is weather, and lots of it. And if you don't like the weather, just wait an hour.

Racism. Yes, there's still a bit, but hardly any. The leader of the BNP Nick Griffin went on radio "Question Time", a serious political talk show, in 2009. There was much discussion about whether such an extremist should be given a platform, but he was. And he made such a complete arse of himself that his party suffered an abrupt decline and he was chucked out as leader. The Labour party has stuck its head up in the racism area, mostly via antisemitism, but it's not a common problem.

Misogyny. Theresa May is the second female PM, the SNP has a female leader, women are pretty much accepted as people here. Although many women say ther's still a way to go.

Abortion. Not an issue.

Freedom. Not an issue. We're free, have been since time immemorial (Magna Carta was in 1215) and find it amusing that Americans think that they invented liberty at a time when they had slavery (which we abolished in 1833).

Theresa May called an election for June 8. She was hoping to get a much improved majority, which would have made it possible for her to give two fingers to those splinters of the Tory party that didn't like her policies. Instead, she got 12 fewer seats, which means that the Tories don't have an absolute majority any more. I would guess that the bigwigs of the party are hopping mad, partly because of this outcome, and partly because her election campaign was weak. Right now, she's still the Tory leader, and can form a government, but I wouldn't be too surprised if she gets ditched by the Tory party, and replaced by ...

Probably Boris, he's at 6/4 odds, way ahead of the field. Other runners and riders are David Davis (in charge of Brexit), Amber Rudd (Home secretary) and Ruth Davidson (leader of the Scottish Tories, who have done rather well against the incumbent SNP).

The main beneficiary of the election has been the Labour party, with a gain of 29 seats. And the biggest gain is in the position of Jeremy Corbyn, which has gone from "nice but unelectable old leftie" to "potential future prime minister". Where Theresa had a lacklustre campaign, Jeremy played a blinder, stomping up and down the country, having well-attended rallies and scoring points off the Tories all over the place. And when his shadow Home Secretary came over as incompetent, a couple of days before the election she was replaced as suffering from a "long term serious illness".

But what will this do to Brexit, we're all wondering. We've already "triggered article 50", which means we've given to two year's notice of departure, and now we have to negotiate our future relationship with the 27 members of the EU. And they have all the cards.

Theresa May had hoped that a big swing to the Tories would strengthen her hand (although I don't think it would have), but now the swing against her has, if anything, weakened her position.

The pound fell a couple of cents against the dollar, which isn't a lot, but shows that the markets aren't keen on the uncertainty that May has caused.

May has gone to the Queen to kiss hands (I don't know if she does that literally), which means that she's asked the Queen if she has permission to form a government (the Queen has only one possible reply). And if she can put together a majority (which she can, just via the votes of the DUP) she can write the Queen's Speech. This is an outline of the propose legislation for the coming session of parliament; written by the PM and read out by the Queen.

Looking forward, I expect a change in the Tory leadership (probably Boris) and as soon as he thinks that he stands a good chance to winning, another election, possibly even this year.

The first thing to say, is that none of the British political parties resemble any of the US political parties. Comparisons don't work.

Also, a General Election in the UK is completely different from the two-year circus that they have in the US. The PM says "OK, we're having an election", and the election happens within a few weeks of that. Also, there are very tight limits on how much can be spent. For example, a candidate can spend £8700 plus 9p per elector, so that would come to £15000 or so. And if you breach this, it's a criminal offence, and MPs do actually get prosecuted. The Tories were fined £70,000 for transgressions, in 2017.

As of today, the largest political party is the Conservative (actually the Conservative and Unionist Party) and often called the Tories and sometimes called the "Nasty party". The leadership of that party is decided by sitting MPs of the party, and when David Cameron resigned in June 2015 as a result of the Brexit farrago, there was a game of "ten green bottles" between June and September, with candidates committing seppuku one at a time until only Theresa May was left; she is currently the leader.

The Tories are a right-center party, low-tax, low-spend. They like to talk about "austerity", which doesn't mean what you think it means. It doesn't mean reductions in spending, it means growth in spending that is less than some people would like.

There's actually two parties welded together (or perhaps even more), of which one is more right than the other. Because of the first-past-the-post electoral system, it would be suicide to split; they'd go from the current 318 seats to considerably less than 100 between them. So they have to find ways to rub along somehow - the Brexit referendum was one result of that, and in the recent general election, Theresa May promised a repeat of the vote on fox hunting (which is currently banned), which in animal-loving Britain is a bit like promising to have a vote on dog fighting. But if a significant segment of the party demanded it, she had to put in this vote-losing policy.

Theresa May's slogan for this election was "Strong and stable", but she actually looked "Weak and wobbly", because A) after saying several times that an early (pre-2020) election would be bad for the country, she U-turned and called the election of 2017, and B) she set a new record for U-turns by reversing a manifesto policy within two days of publishing it - it is usual that a manifesto policy is U-turned only *after* the election.

Why did she call the election? Well, the polls showed the Tories bigly in the lead, with a 20% lead over Labour, and one can't help but suspect that this was a factor. In the event, she did a very poor campaign, Corbyn played a blinder, and the Tories lost 12 seats. Don't be surprised if the Tories ditch May, and the favourite for the job is Boris Johnson.

Boris Johnson, usually called just "Boris", there being not many Borises around, was previously Mayor of London and is another Tory in the mould of Cameron, but talks rather well, scattering Latin and Greek and other classical references in his speeches. On the other hand, he acts a bit like a clown. Which, of course, goes down well or badly, depending on whether you like clownish politicians.

The second largest party (as of today) is the Labour party, which is left-of-centre. This also has two wings, the left (sometimes called Blairite after Tony Blair) and the very left, personified by the current leader of the party, Jeremy Corbyn and his fan club, called Momentum. Their policies are tax-and-spend. Soak the rich and an end to austerity (which was fake, see above). They also refer to austerity as "the cuts", meaning that the increases in spending aren't as great as they'd like them to be. They also don't seem to be able to shake off the taint of racism. Their slogan was "For the many, not the few", but some people said that it's more like "For the many, not the jew".

So the previous Labour leader was Ed Milliband, who became leader in 2010 after Gordon Brown got slung out, by beating his brother David (who many people thought should have been leader. Ed then A) lost the 2015 election, which led to his departure, but not before he permanently changed the character of the Labour party by changing the rules.

Previously, Labour MPs elected their leader. But Ed changed the rules, and now the Labour leader is elected by *all* members of the Labour Party. And you can join (if you're more than 14 years old) for £4/month, or £2 if you're 20-26, retired, unwaged or a union member etc). A lot of peo-ple signed up so they could vote for the Labour leader and as a result, the Labour party lurched bigly to the left, and elected Jeremy Corbyn, previously an obscure old leftie.

The third largest party is the SNP (Scottish National Party). They are a one-issue party. We had a referendum in 2014 (called the once-in-a-generation referendum) for Scottish independence, and the Scots rejected that idea. The SNP want another referendum, on the principle that "we'll keep having referenda until you get it right" but the 2017 election showed that the Scots don't want to vote on this again, on the flimsy ground that we did this already, and stop nagging.

The SNP is also very left; perhaps about as left as the Labour party is now. In the 2015 election, they got 56 seats in the HoC, which was very nearly a clean sweep of all Scottish constituencies, but in 2017, they lost 21 of those, and look a lot weaker than they did.

The fourth party is the Lib-dems (Liberal Democrats) which were formed as a union of the Liberal party (which 100 years ago was one of the two main parties) and the Social Democrats (which formed as a splinter party from the Labour Party in 1981, and has served as an awful example of what happens when you split one of the big two parties.

They are anti-Brexit (even after the referendum), which doesn't seem to have done them any good in the 2017 election.

The DUP (Democratic Unionist Party) is a kind of Northern Ireland Tory party. They would tend to vote with the Tories. Their main importance is in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

And there's a bunch of other parties.

Sinn Fein. The Irish republican party. Seven seats, but they are pledged to abstain from voting in the HoC.

Plaid Cymru is the Welsh Party. Four seats.

The Green party is what you're expect. They have one seat.

And a few of the parties with no seats:

UKIP (UK Independence Party) was a one-issue party, campaigning for Brexit, which means that they are now a zero-issue party, a "party without a cause". They have zero seats.

The British National Party (BNP) - extreme right, racist and not nice. They got no seats, and only 0.1% of the electorate voted for them.

The Worker's Revolutionary Party - extreme left. They got 771 votes out of the whole country's electorate of 47 million.

The Monster Raving Loony Party. They got almost as many votes as the BNP. The MRLP is a vernerable and respected British Institution, and they're in it for the fun. Their slogan is "Vote for insanity".

Some people think we don't have a constitution. But we do. What we don't have is a single document entitled "The Constitution". The British Constitution is contained in a series of documents, which, taken together, are our constitution. Some people in the US think they have a single document entitled "The Constitution", but they too have a series of documents which, taken together, comprise "The Constitution"

The best known of our documents, is Magna Carta, the Great Charter, of 1215. Actually, that was annulled in 1216, but was subsequently changed and re-issued, changed again and re-issued, and it doesn't say what many people think it says. Nevertheless, it's an important early document.

Another important document is the Bill of Rights, 1689, limiting the power of the monarch and setting out the rights of parliament.

At the head of the British political system is the monarch, currently Queen Elizabeth II. She is also the head of the Church of England. She has no power whatsoever. She launches ships, opens supermarkets and parliament, and is an immense tourist attraction.

The real sovereign power in the UK is the House of Commons, also known as the Mother of Parliaments, because so many other countries have copied our system. There are 650 seats (that number can change with changes in electoral boundaries), each elected by a constituency using a first-past-the-post system. That system favours the two large parties, punishes any small parties and is a huge deterrent to either of the two big parties to split. There is also the House of Lords (also known as the Upper House), which is unelected (currently 800 members). Lords (and Ladies) are "appointed" and not elected. There is constant agitation for this to change to an elected Upper House, but there's no sign of this happening soon. The HoL has 92 hereditary peers (this is a fossil of the 1066 Norman Conquest), and 26 Lords Spiritual. The Lords Spiritual are archbishops and bishops of the Church of England, and is the only impact of religion on British politics, because whenever any politician expresses religious faith, they are subjected to prolonged and derisive laughter, unlike the situation in the US, where loudly and repeatedly expressed religious belief appears to be a necessity.

A few definitions - there is a kingdom called England, a kingdom called Scotland (but the UK monarch combines those roles), a principality called Wales (the monarch's eldest son is the Prince of Wales, and there's Northern Ireland, also called "the six counties" or "Ulster". The UK is all of the above. "Great Britain" is England, Wales and Scotland, but sometimes people use it to mean the UK. The term "Britain" is very poorly defined, it could mean just the largest island, or the whole political entity. We have a thing called "devolution" which means that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all have their own parliaments, with various amounts of power. The Scottish parliament (also called "Holyrood" after the location where it sits) has a lot of power; they have, for example, enacted that university education should be free. The Northern Ireland parliament (also called "Stormont" after the location where it sits) has some power too. The Welsh Parliament (actually called the National Assembly for Wales) has very little power.

When the UK joined the EU, we agreed that our HoC would pass any regulations that the EU passed. Actually, we joined the EEC (European Economic Community, we had a referendum in 1975), which was very different. First of all there were only nine members, and secondly is was more about free trade. The EU (European Union) has 28 members, and is committed to "ever closer union", meaning we're trying to become a kind of "United States of Europe".

But there's always been people in the UK who weren't too keen on the EU (known as Eurosceptics) of which Nigel Farage (who loves to pose outside a pub holding a pint and a fag pretending to be a man-of-the-people although he's actually a millionaire ex-stockbroker) was the loudest mouth. And in 2015, the current Prime Minister (PM) David Cameron, in order to fend off UKIP (the UK Independence Party, a one-issue party headed by Farage whose only objective was to leave the EU) and to avoid a split in his own party (there being many eurosceptics and many europhiles in the party), promised to hold a referendum on leaving the EU (British exit, or Brexit) on an assumption that he made that Brexit would be rejected. In June 2015 the referendum happened amid a welter of misinformation emitted by both Leave and Remain, and to everyone's surprise, we voted Brext, 52% against 48%, and since Cameron had neglected to set any threshold for the referendum, we were committed to leave. Cameron resigned, there wa a brisk and brutal fight amongst the grandees of the party, and Theresa May (formerly Home Secretary) emerged as the only candidate after all the others "voluntarily" dropped out.

Brexit is the worst idea we've had since 1169, when we invaded Ireland.

Thursday, 8 June 2017

I had thought of writing NONE on my ballot paper. These do actually get counted, but I don't think we're taken seriously.

The Tories were excluded for a number of reasons. Theresa May kicked off by saying she'd revisit the fox hunting ban, which is about as bad as promising a vote on dog fighting. Then the manifesto came out, which was vague and wordy, without specifics, not many numbers. Followed, almost immediately, by a U-turn, which made her look weak and wobbly. And she's not telling us her objectives in Brexit, except that "Brexit means Brexit" which is what is known as a tautology.

Labour didn't look good, because of their racism. And the garden tax. And a Home Secretary who seemed to think that all numbers were equally valid, then we were told she's seriously ill long-term, yet is planning to return to the fray. And a Chancellor who is too keen to spend Other People's Money.

And UKIP is a one-issue party with racist leanings, where their issue has been pretty much settled.

Then ladysolly pointed out that Peter Jones (whose namesake was the Guide) was on the list as Libdem candidate. And we saw him handing out leaflets at our local tube station, and he was the only candidate we'd actually seen in this election. Plus, he gave us some help several years ago, as a councillor.

There's nothing we actually dislike about the Libdems, other than Clegg's disastrous coalition with the Tories that led to his reversal on university fees. And they are, at least, in favour of the EU.

There's 23,000 people on the list of "people of interest". And I've seen calls to "intern them all", in the same way that we interned German citizens in WWII. But there's a few problems with that idea.

The biggest problem is this. How do you get onto that list? One good way is if you say something very inflammatory, and get reported on the hotline. But another good way is if you regularly park outside your neighbour's house, and they get very angry about that, and you get reported on the hotline. In other words, being reported on the hotline gets you put on a list, whether you deserve it or not.

So, first of all, we have Magna Carta. Clause 39, "No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land."

This is an important principle of British justice, and the core of our Constitution (yes, Britain does have a Constitution, it's just that there isn't one single document called "The Constitution"). And without this important safeguard, the state could, without recourse to a court of law, imprison anyone, indefinitely.

You might think "Well, this doesn't apply to me; I'm not a terrorist, or a muslim, or wear a beard". But it does; each time you offend your neighbour (and I've done that in the past), they would have the option of getting you exiled to a prison island by calling the Hotline.

Why was it different in WWII? Well, first of all, it didn't work via denunciation, it was based on someone being a citizen of an enemy country. And secondly, we weren't facing the occasional stabbing, we were facing the Blitz (40,000 killed) and invasion by the Nazi army. And even then, when the Americans interned all the Japanese Americans in WWII, this is now considered to be a very shameful episode (and was considered shameful even at the time, by many).

We did use internment against the IRA. But the threat posed by the IRA was a hundred times as great as that from today's Islamists. Look at the figures.

So ... no. I don't want 23,000 people interned on some prison island just because there might be a few on that list who will take a knife and start stabbing.

Wednesday, 7 June 2017

A few days ago, my usenet feed stopped working. Today, I noticed, and started to do something about it.

First, I tested the computer that's supposed to collect the usenet feed. To test it, I used pine (alpine), which is not only a great text-only mail reader, it's also a usenet reader. And sure enough, I couldn't log in to my usenet feed.

So I tried another computer. Same problem. And then another ... and it worked! I tried several more, and wound up with two that didn't work, and six that worked.

So I contacted the usenet feed supplier. They responded quickly by giving me a new username and password. That didn't help at all.

I thought a bit, and decided to use telnet. telnet can do anything that other protocols can do. Instead of telnet usenet.com, I typed telnet usenet.com 119, which tells telnet to connect to port 119, the usenet (nntp) port. It asked for a username and password. The exchange looks like this, when it works:

And at that point, I noticed that the computers that worked, used1.2.3.4 and the ones that didn't work, used 2.3.4.5. And I thought, why is that? And I had a look at the hosts file, and sure enough, I'd put in an entry that forced reader.usenet.com to resolve to 2.3.4.5 on the ones that didn't work, and I'm guessing that the feed had stopped using that server. So I changed the hosts file, and everything works now!

Is this Worldpay? I don't know, but I have no reason to think that it is.

The email tells me that my invoice is ready, and it give my correct Merchant number.

So I called them (at the number I got from the real Worldpay web site), and told them about this. They assured me that it isn't a scam email, it really did come from them, although I don't know how they could verify that.

If it's a scam despite what they are saying, then this isn't their fault. But if it isn't a scam (which is what they said) and it really did come from Worldpay, then they have just increased the amount of stupid.

We try to educate users, we try to explain to them why it's a bad idea to click on a link that you don't recognise. And organisations like Worldpay sabotage this attempt at education by offering people a link to click on which is not one that they would expect.

I get at least one of these each day. The idea is that I pay them money, and they make sure that my web site is "registered" with the search engines. They don't say which ones, "registered" is meaningless and they won't actually do anything.

It's a very old scam, I've been seeing this for 20 years now. But the fact that I'm still seeing it, means that it must work on at least some people.

The truth is, you don't have to "register" with search engines. They find you and list you.

Search Engine Optimisation, however, really is a thing, although I suspect that most of the people spamming me to offer it, don't really know much and will be poor value for money. If you want to make your web site more noticeable to search engines, there are some things that you can do - Google and you'll find a bunch of sites giving good advice. And then you can do it yourself, very easily.

Tuesday, 6 June 2017

Suppose someone asked you to come up with a way to perpetuate divisions in our society, a way to ensure that people aren't encouraged to to mingle with people who are different and a way to ensure that people continue to misunderstand and dislike other people with different ideas and religions.

Obviously you would start off by aiming at the children. Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man. So - faith schools. Put the children of Protestant parents (wrongly known as Protestant children, because I don't see how a five year old can be *any* religion) into Protestant schools, and likewise for Catholics. That worked *so well* in Northern Ireland!

The school I went to, The Grocers Company School, aka Hackney Downs, was roughly half Jewish, half Christian (or so someone once told me, I don't actually know if that was true). We were vaguely aware that some of us had parents with a different faith, but it really didn't matter to us, and often you neither knew nor cared. My best chum went on to become a Christian minister.

Now imagine a single-faith school. There's no impediment to major propaganda in favour of one faith and against all others. But worse, there's no impediment to teaching the children to hate people subscribing to other faiths. Children are little sponges, soaking up everything they hear, and they hear a lot more than you might think. They also pick up the subtexts, and hear the dog whistles.

In the UK today, we have groups of people who see themselves as very different from other groups, and want to perpetuate that difference. The route to division is to encourage segregation, the route to assimilation is to let the children mingle.

And that's why I'm so opposed to faith schools. If we want Muslim children to grow up knowing and respecting Jewish people (and vice versa), if we want Chistian children to grow up understanding an befriending Sikh children (and vice versa), then we have to give them the opportunity to mingle, and the children will do the rest, because they can *see* that their little friend Topba is a good friend and nice to know, and they won't *care* what her religion is.

Meanwhile, people are talking about whether grammar schools are a
good idea or not, (I think they're good) while taking no notice of the
major threat from faith schools.

Currently, faith schools aren't allowed to select more than 50% of children from their favourite religion.

Theresa May wants to change that, to allow faith schools to become more monofaith.

The word at the root of "terrorist" is "terror". I'm not terrified. I'm not even slightly scared. I don't really know how other people feel, but I don't think they are either. One of the enduring images of the recent London attack, was a man moving briskly down the street away from a threat, carefully carrying his pint of beer.

So why am I not terrified? And why isn't anyone else?

Because it's small.

Let's start with the latest attack. A man attacked a policeman with a hammer, in Paris. A hammer? Hasn't he heard of knives? Ladysolly has some pretty sharp knives in her kitchen, they aren't exactly hard to find. And he got shot in the chest for his efforts.

Then there's London Bridge. Seven dead, 60 injured. Weapons used - a hired van and knives. The police were called, and within 8 minutes, all three were dead in a hail of 50 bullets.

Manchester; a bomb, killing 22 and injuring many more. It isn't actually easy to get the resources to make a bomb, and it isn't easy to make one without killing yourself at the preparation stage.

Westminster bridge; again, a vehicle and a knife. Five killed (plus the attacker), 50 injured.

All this might be worrying, but now let's look at another statistic - people killed in accidents on our roads. The figure was 1732 in 2015, and it's been steady at that level for a few years. That's 33 per week.

You are *massively* more likely to be killed in a road accident, than by a terrorist, especially when the best they can come up with is cars, vans, knives and hammers. And yet we get into our car and drive to work, or for fun, without a moment's thought about the possibility of becoming one of those 1732.

Even water is more dangerous! In 2016, 300 people drowned, and 77 of those weren't even intending to get into the water, they were out walking or running. But that isn't going to deter me from walking or cycling. And by the way, 113 people were killed on bicycles in 2014.

Let's look at an extreme situation - the Blitz, in 1940/41. 40,000 civilians were killed, and even that didn't change our minds about the war against the Nazis, it just made us more determined.

More recently - I worked in London at the time of the IRA bombing campaign. 600 civilians were killed by the IRA, and the main difference it made was that rubbish bins were swapped from made of metal to polythene bags.

I was also commuting to London at the time of the Kings Cross fire - 31 killed, and that had a couple of long term effects - smoking was banned on the underground, which I was very happy about, being a non-smoker.

Another big thing when I was commuting - the Moorgate tube crash. As far as we could see, the driver of the train, drove headlong into a dead end, killing 43 people. At the time, Moorgate was the station I was commuting to! That could have been me. Again, the main long term effect was a new safety system that wouild stop the train in such a situation even if the driver didn't.

Shit happens. Sometimes big shit happens. The terrorists are shit, but they're not medium shit, they are not even small shit. They are just arseholes.